MATT: Hello, everybody, and welcome to this talk at Google
sponsored by [INAUDIBLE].
I'm delighted and very grateful to have Dr. Ronald Siegel here
to talk to us today about mindfulneess
and how mindfulness practice can help
us cope with everyday problems.
So before he gets up here, let me give you a little bit
of background on him.
He is an assistant professor of psychology
part-time at Harvard Medical School,
where he's taught for over 30 years.
He is a longtime student of mindfulness meditation
and serves on the board of directors and faculty
of the Institute for Meditation and Psychotherapy.
He teaches internationally about the application
of mindfulness practice in psychotherapy and other fields
and maintains a private clinical practice
in Lincoln, Massachusetts.
He is the co-editor of the critically acclaimed text,
"Mindfulness and Psychotherapy, Second Edition,"
the co-editor of "Wisdom and Compassion in Psychotherapy--
Deepening Mindfulness in Clinical Practice,"
which contains a foreword by His Holiness the Dalai Lama.
He is the author of a book for a more general audience,
"The Mindfulness Solution-- Everyday Practice for Everyday
Problems," which I believe will be on sale in here
at a discounted rate to Googlers.
He recently created a comprehensive new course
for the general public, which is part of the Great Courses
series named The Science of Mindfulness--
A Research-Based Path to Well-Being,
which gets my personal recommendation.
I've recently completed that, and it's fantastic.
And he is also a regular contributor
to other professional publications
and is the co-director of the Annual Harvard Medical School
Conference on meditation and psychotherapy.
So without further ado, please join me
in welcoming Dr. Siegel on set.
[APPLAUSE]
RON SIEGEL: Welcome, everybody.
Thank you, Matt, for inviting me and for everybody else
at Google for inviting me.
Thank you for coming here in person and those
of you who have come virtually.
Usually, we don't choose to attend a talk like this
when we've just fallen in love, won the lottery,
and gotten a promotion.
Rather, we get interested in these topics
either when we've had some kind of a downturn in our lives,
or maybe our lights are going OK on the outside,
but for whatever reason, we're feeling
some degree of emotional distress or difficulty.
And it turns out that in recent years,
neurobiologists, clinical researchers, and mental health
professionals have discovered that a number
of ancient practices, mindfulness practice that
have been refined over the last 2,500 years or so,
turned out to be extremely useful for helping us to work
with all sorts of everyday emotional difficulties,
everything from anxiety and depression
to serious difficulties like chronic pain
or, perhaps, relational conflict.
And in a few minutes, I'm going to teach you about some
of those practices and show you how you
can use them in your own life.
But in order to use those effectively,
it's very, very helpful to have a sense of,
how come life is so difficult for all of us
in the first place?
Well, it turns out that we didn't actually
evolve to be happy.
Our brains developed primarily as organs
of survival, the same way the other organs
in the body developed.
And to understand this, it's helpful to look back
at our past, and let's start by looking at Lucy.
This is an artist's conception of our great great great great
great great great great great great et cetera grandmother.
And she was hanging around on the African Savannah
somewhere between three and 1/2 and four and 1/2 million years
ago.
There may be an earlier common ancestor.
We're not sure.
And we know that she survived, because we've got her DNA.
But how did she possibly survive out there competing
with the other wildlife?
Imagine here coming face to face with a lion?
What could she do?
Well, she could grit her teeth and bear her claws,
[GROWLING NOISE] but that probably
wouldn't be too effective.
She might try to rely on her hide for protection,
but that's pretty limited.
Her fur was sillier still.
She wasn't very fast.
One of the first things that you learn,
if you ever go on a walking safari in Africa,
and there's a couple of guides usually,
and they've got big guns.
And they say to the tourists, please, please, please,
no matter what happens, just don't run.
Why?
Because everything scary out there is faster than you are.
You see that half blind hippopotamus--
I mean that half blind rhinoceros behind those trees?
38 miles an hour.
That big lumbering hippopotamus in the mud
puddle-- 42 miles an hour.
And furthermore, if you run, everything that's a predator
is going to think you're prey, and it'll make matters worse.
So she couldn't escape.
She had reasonable sight-- not as
good as an eagle or a giraffe, but better than the rhino.
Reasonable hearing.
A lousy sense of smell.
Just ask your dog.
How does she possibly make it?
Well, she basically had a few things going for her.
She had a fight or flight system that
was capable of emergency response,
and this was inherited first from reptiles
and refined more by mammals.
And she also had, on top of that, a prehensile thumb,
an opposable thumb that could pick up
objects, which was really, really good for using tools.
And if you've ever seen your dog try to use a tool,
you understand how useful it is to have a thumb.
And the other thing that she had was she
had a capacity for thinking-- for thinking about the past,
analyzing what had happened, and projecting it into the future.
And it's this third capacity that helped her enormously
and also gets us into a lot of trouble,
because it turns out with this ability
to analyze the past for pleasure and pain,
and try to maximize future pleasure,
and avoid future pain, isn't some kind of neutral computing
apparatus.
It's actually subject to something
called the negativity bias.
This is how cognitive scientists refer to it.
If you think of Lucy's predicament out there,
she could've made one of two kinds of errors,
and we could think of these as a type 1
and a type 2 error, kind of analogous to the same kind
of errors that we use in scientific research.
She could've looked at a bush with a beige shape behind it,
and think, oh, my god, it's a lion, when it was really
just a beige rock.
Or she could've looked at the same shape
and said, eh, it's a beige rock, when it was really a lion.
Now Lucy could have made thousands of type 1 errors
and still lived to propagate her DNA,
but if she made just one type 2 error, that's
the end of her DNA line.
So we developed minds and brains that are really, really
good at these type 1 errors.
Our minds, as my friend Rick Hansen puts it,
are like Velcro for bad experiences
and Teflon for good ones.
Anything bad that happens in our life sticks.
The good ones slide right off the pan.
If you meet with your boss for a review,
and you hear about nine things that you're doing great,
and your boss tells you about one area of insufficiency,
what are you going to think about at 3:00 in the morning?
It's not the nine things that you're doing so well.
And there are countless examples of this.
Even other animals do it.
If you run a rat through a maze, and at the end of a given
pathway, give it some food, it's got to go through that trial
several times to learn the pathway.
If at the end, you give it an electric shock, one trial
learning, that's all it needs, and it remembers this.
Even in couples, there are people--
there's a couple of psychologists
by the last name of Gottman in the Seattle area,
and they study couples.
And they find that on average, we
need five warm and fuzzy interactions with a partner
to undo the loss of trust that comes from one fight.
So the mind has this very strong negativity bias.
We can try a little experiment here just to test this out.
It may-- we'll see how this works given
the current political climate.
But I'm going to say two words, and I
want you to notice the very first words that
come to your mind after I say those two words.
Ready?
Here are the two words-- Bill Clinton.
What do you get?
What came to mind?
Don't be shy.
What?
AUDIENCE: Scandal.
RON SIEGEL: Scandal.
Anybody get Monica, for example?
Yes.
Blue dress.
Scandal.
Something like that.
That's still what comes to many of our minds,
even though, obviously, his wife is running
for office at the moment.
Now whatever you think of his presidency or politics,
I mean, he helped resolve the conflicts in Northern Ireland.
It was a period of prosperity.
The fact that what we remember from this is Monica Lewinsky
shows you how easy it is for the negativity bias
to grab hold of something.
Scandals stick.
Loss of trust sticks.
Bad experiences stick.
It gets worse.
It turns out that life is difficult for everybody,
in part, because we have trouble with change.
This starts very, very early.
I don't want to give up my diapers
and start to use the potty.
The current arrangement suits me just fine.
Are you kidding?
School with all those strange people and that weird person
called the teacher?
I'm not going there.
I want to stay home with mom and dad.
Now maybe there's some excitement about these things,
but there's often a lot of reluctance.
I remember, I have twin daughters.
They're actually my strongest meditation teachers.
And I remember when they were born,
and we thought, well, we've got to do something practical.
I'd better give up my Toyota Corolla and get a minivan.
I didn't think it was so cool.
I wasn't embracing the change.
18 years later, they're ready to go off to college,
and I went into mourning.
I thought, now after 18 years of trying
to form a good relationship with them
and be a caring, loving dad, they're
going to abandon me like other girls did when I was 18?
Who wrote this script?
My wife, luckily, has a little bit more wisdom
about these matters than I did, and she points out,
had they been so impaired that they couldn't go off,
I'd even more upset.
But change is hard.
And as I projected forward, I'm getting to be an old guy now,
and imagined entering assisted living,
even if they're playing the Stones
for my entire generation, I don't
think I'm going to embrace the change.
How about you?
Has anybody noticed any changes in their body
since you were 20?
Have you welcomed and embraced them all?
This is a hard road.
There's another problem.
One of the other things we see when we go to an African game
park, and it actually gets a little bit repetitive,
because in species after species, the story is the same.
There's the dominant male hanging around
with the reproductively promising females,
and then there's another group of males
who are younger doing the species equivalent of playing
basketball, honing their skills and tools,
getting ready to be able to try to topple the dominant male.
And we see this in species after species after species.
In humans, this concern for position in the tribe
or in the pack is expressed as a concern for self-esteem.
If you examine your minds, and we
get to do this with mindfulness practices,
we start to see that our minds are constantly
comparing ourselves to others.
And we choose many, many different domains
and dimensions for this.
For one person, it's who's wealthier.
For someone else, it's who's smarter.
For another person, who's got the higher rank position.
For someone else, it's who's got the better physique
or is better athletically.
Who's thinner?
Who's more attractive?
Who's more creative?
Who has more friends?
Who is more loved?
The list goes on and on and on.
If you hang out with meditators the way
I do, it gets really funny.
Who makes fewer comparisons?
Who's less self-focused?
Who sees the bigger picture better?
But it's all the same kind of thing.
Now assuming you guys are like me,
and your minds make these kinds of comparisons, any of you
always win?
I once asked a group that question,
and a guy raised his hand, and I thought, avoid him at lunch.
Bad sign, right?
Of course.
We win some and we lose some.
And the problem is unless we live in Lake Wobegon,
where all the women are strong, the men are good-looking,
and every child is above average,
we're always going to be going up and then with this.
We're constantly, constantly faced with disappointment
and sense of failure and sense of inadequacy,
because it's absolutely impossible
to stay on top all the time.
Even if you're a gold medalist in the Olympics,
four years later, you're probably dethroned,
and if not then, eight years later for sure.
Now to make matters even worse, who here is going to die?
That's about 20% of the hands went up.
That's a pretty aware group, right?
So we have this really bad predicament.
We're very, very focused on who we are, how we seem,
how we're doing.
There's all this change going on, and in the end,
we fall apart and die.
It's no wonder that we have a lot of psychological distress.
So what I'd like to do is focus in on some
of these particular psychological disorders
and the most common ones, and I want
to do this by discussing a little bit of a battle that
went on in the American Psychiatric Association
when they were formulating the DSM-5.
The DSM is the Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual of the American Psychiatric Association.
It's basically the code book for classifying
different kinds of psychological and psychiatric problems.
And there was this battle when they were designing the newest
copy between what we might call the lumpers and the splitters.
The splitters said, what was wrong with the old system was
we just didn't yet have a sufficient number
of diagnostic categories.
We were still inadvertently combining apples and oranges.
The lumpers said, you know, that's crazy.
It doesn't really fit my experience.
In fact, as a clinician, for example, I rarely
see a person with a single diagnosis.
Almost everybody's got a little bit
of this, a little bit of that, something of a third diagnosis,
and in fact, it changes from week to week.
They said, you know, I think if you create more categories,
you're going to miss the forest for the trees.
The splitters, at this point, naturally said, what forest?
The lumper said, well, for example,
you're not going to see any of the universals
in human psychological difficulties.
You'll not see the kinds of problems
that cut across these different categories.
They said universals?
These are separate diseases.
They're like syphilis and a broken bone.
What's the universals there?
Well, the lumpers say, for example, one really powerful
universal is what we might call emotional or experiential
avoidance.
And let me give you an idea of how this works.
Have any of you ever drunk alcohol?
Come on.
20% again?
Thank you.
That's a little bit more realistic.
Now I know I'm in California, so some of you
are going to claim this, but who does it
exclusively for the taste?
Nobody.
Very honest group.
Most of us, when we drink alcohol,
we do it because we'd like to change one state of mind
into a somewhat different state.
Let's say we've had a hard day at work,
and we're feeling a little tense,
and muscularly we're kind of like this.
And we think, you know, a beer or a glass of wine--
that would help.
I'd feel a little bit more mellow.
Or we're going to go to a party, and there
are going to be some people there we don't know, or worse,
there are going to be some people there who we do know.
And we think, you know, a drink would just
make this go a little bit more smoothly.
So generally, we drink because we
want to change one state into a different state,
a tense or anxious or unpleasant state into a more pleasant one.
And of course, if we do that from time to time, no problem.
But if we do that compulsively and a lot, and in fact,
can't face life situations without doing it,
well, then we have a substance abuse problem.
Let's take another common problem.
Let's take anxiety.
If I get nervous before speaking at Google,
or I get nervous before flying in airplanes,
but I fly in airplanes, and I speak at Google,
I don't have an anxiety disorder.
I'm just a kind of nervous guy.
If however, I avoid public speaking,
or I won't fly in a plane, because I
want to not feel anxious, that's the pathway
to an anxiety disorder.
And that can spread to all sorts of things
that we wind up avoiding, because we're
trying not to feel the anxiety.
There was an astronaut, one of the early space-goers
who was being interviewed by an actor,
because the actor was going to play him in a movie,
and he wanted to do a faithful job of this.
And the actor said, I don't get it.
How do you possibly have the courage
to go up in those untested rockets?
I would've been terrified.
And the actor said, I think you're misunderstanding.
Courage isn't about not being terrified.
We were terrified.
We had no idea if the things were going to hold together.
Courage is about doing what it makes sense to do,
even as you feel the fear.
So we see that emotional or experiential avoidance,
trying not to feel anxious is actually
at the heart of anxiety disorders.
Let's take one more.
Let's look at depression a little bit.
Now all of us, even if you've never
been to a therapist or anything like that,
have sometimes been sad, and sometimes we felt depressed.
What in your experience is the difference?
How does it feel differently, qualitatively
to be sad or depressed?
Don't be shy about this.
Everybody knows we've all experienced these things.
Anybody want to offer a difference between sadness
and how that feels and depression?
AUDIENCE: Depression has more hopelessness.
RON SIEGEL: Depression has more hopelessness.
Absolutely.
It's got this thought that it's never going to end.
Absolutely.
AUDIENCE: Unenthusiastic.
RON SIEGEL: Unenthusiastic in depression, and there's
a kind of we're cut off from life engagement,
from interests, right?
What else?
AUDIENCE: Maybe like a localized to one
experience versus pervading the rest of--
RON SIEGEL: Yeah, often sadness is poignant.
It's kind of localized.
We're sad about something, and often depression
is much broader than that.
And it's kind of our whole life feels sort of empty or dead.
Anybody, one more?
So one way you could think of this, and one of the features
that to my mind cuts to the chase of it, is in depression,
we feel kind of dead and kind of shut down,
whereas in sadness, it's about a given object.
We're kind of alive.
We're kind of still engaged in life.
When Shakespeare wrote, parting is such sweet sorrow,
we get it.
Had he written, parting is such sweet depression, we'd think,
this guy doesn't know how to write.
That wouldn't speak to us.
So we can see that even in something like depression,
there's a kind of shutting down of the organism.
There's a kind of closing down and avoiding experience,
which is part of this.
So there's a very nice little video that is, to my mind,
a wonderful visual metaphor for this,
which I'd like to show to you.
It's very brief, but it gives you
a sense of how this plays out and, frankly,
how experiential avoidance winds up multiplying our misery.
[GONG]
[BUZZING]
[SNIFFS]
[BLOWS]
[BUZZING]
[SWORD SWINGING]
[GRUNT]
[BUZZING]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
RON SIEGEL: The way in which mindfulness practices are going
to help us with this wide variety of different kinds
of psychological difficulties is pretty much
the way the samurai warrior learned to deal with his fly.
Mindfulness practices develop cross-culturally
in order to deal with everyday psychological distress.
They've been refined probably most intensively
in Buddhist cultures, where we have
about 2,500 years of a written record of monks and nuns
doing these practices intensively
and talking about various variations of them.
But they exist in one form or another
in virtually every culture.
So let's talk about what mindfulness is,
and then we'll talk about how we can use it
for these different kinds of everyday psychological
problems.
As we're using it in Western psychotherapies these days,
mindfulness is a translation of a Pali term,
and Pali was the vernacular language
in which the teachings of the historical Buddha
were first written down.
And the word in Pali is sati.
And it connotes awareness, attention, and remembering.
And the awareness and attention part
is pretty much the way we use them in English--
to be aware, to pay attention.
But the remembering is different.
It's not about remembering what you
had for breakfast or, for that matter,
even remembering childhood trauma.
It's about remembering to be aware and pay attention
at each moment of our day.
Now there's a scholar of the ancient text named
John Dunne at Emory University, and he
raised the following criticism.
He said, if you could imagine a sniper poised
on top of a building getting ready to take out
an innocent victim, that sniper would
be very aware, very attentive, and every time
his mind wandered from the task at hand,
he'd be zeroing right in on it.
And John said, I don't think that's exactly
the attitude you're trying to develop in yourselves
as psychotherapists, nor the attitude you're
trying to cultivate in your patients or clients.
Something's missing here.
And what's missing is a sense of non-judgment, acceptance,
kindness, and friendliness.
Now there's some scholars who say that's included in sati,
but the important point is that this non-judgment or acceptance
is a scale unto itself, which takes some work to cultivate.
Let me show you what I mean.
Join me in looking at this fellow.
And just take in the picture of him,
and see what emotion arises as you look at him.
And raise your hand if what you feel
is a sense of harsh and critical judgment.
We can talk afterwards, if so.
But most of us look at him and feel something like, aw.
Now even if he pees and poops at the wrong time
in the wrong place, even if he doesn't listen to instructions,
we can understand.
He's young.
He's a puppy.
He needs training.
Now when you take up mindfulness practices, most of us,
one of the first things we see is that our mind does actually
pee and poop at the wrong time in the wrong place,
and it doesn't listen to instructions at all,
that it's quite, quite unruly.
And the same kind of loving attitude
that we would cultivate toward that puppy, that's
what we're going to try to cultivate toward whatever
arises in our consciousness, including
depressive feelings, anxious feelings, physical pain,
and the like.
So putting this together, we might
say that therapeutic mindfulness has three components.
It's awareness of present experience with acceptance.
And nowadays, mindfulness is very hot in psychotherapy,
and it's very hot in the most scientifically-oriented
psychotherapies.
So people are interested in measuring mindfulness,
and they've developed about half a dozen scales
to do this, because if they set up a treatment, and it works,
they want to know whether people actually became more mindful
and whether that was the active ingredient,
or whether there were other elements in the treatment that
had made them feel better.
And an interesting thing about measuring
mindfulness is mindfulness is highly
subject to what's called the Dunning Kruger effect.
Now Dunning and Kruger were a pair of social psychologists
at Cornell University, and they observed
that across all sorts of human activities,
actual competence is inversely proportional to perceived
competence.
Get that?
Actual competence is inversely proportional to perceived
competence.
You can think of this as the Homer Simpson effect.
Homer is supremely confident when he goes out
on one of his misadventures.
It's just us in the audience thinking, I don't know.
Looks pretty bad, right?
Well, people who really think they know what they're
doing often don't, and this is no more clear
than in mindfulness.
What happens is if you give one of these mindfulness
scales to somebody who's been, oh, practicing meditation
for 20 or 30 years, they'll say, oh, yeah,
I was aware of my present experience once.
It was on top of a mountain for about five minutes
about eight years ago.
When you tell people who haven't done the practice much,
they say, oh, sure, I'm living in the present all the time.
And kind of the take-home point here
is don't be surprised when can take up mindfulness practice
if you find a lot of moments of mindlessness,
if you find a lot of moments of mind wandering,
of operating on automatic, of being lost in the thought
stream and the constant narrative that
goes through our minds.
And mindfulness is a lot swimming, eating a gourmet
meal, or making love.
Talking about it isn't the same as experiencing it,
so let's, even though I'm mostly giving this as a talk,
let's spend a few minutes doing some mindfulness practice
together.
And I invite you to put down whatever is in your hands,
and find a comfortable posture.
I'm not sitting in those chairs, but look for a posture,
and we'll do this with the eyes closed.
And please do this, those of you who
are listening to this on YouTube or are streaming it
through the Google system.
Just allow your eyes to close, and find a comfortable posture
in which your spine is more or less erect.
And one way to find that posture is to imagine a string
tied to the top of the head, pulling toward the sky,
gently elongating the spine.
And in almost all mindfulness practices,
what we do is we begin with a sensory object of awareness,
some sensation that we can pay attention to.
And arbitrarily, we're going to choose the breath right now,
so just begin to notice the sensations of your breath.
And notice all the feelings that are happening as you breathe in
and as you breathe out.
And see for a few moments, if it's possible,
to follow the breath through its full cycles
from the beginning of the inhalation
to the end of an exhalation and onto the next.
So we're just going to practice being
aware of present experience with acceptance,
focusing on the breath as an object of awareness.
Now it would not be unusual for thoughts to enter the mind.
That's OK.
They're our friends.
We're not trying to chase them away.
But instead of following a thought the way
we normally would, we're just going
to let it arise and pass, kind of like a cloud showing
up and leaving the sky.
Gently, returning our attention to the breath.
This is a lot like puppy training.
The mind scampers off.
We gently bring it back to the breath.
It's scampers again.
We gently bring it back again.
And all of the other judgments-- I like this, I don't like this,
I can concentrate, I can't, I'm a good meditator,
I'm a bad meditator-- those are just other thoughts that we
allow to arise and pass.
Just gently training the mind for a few moments
to step out of the thought stream and come to our senses.
Gently bring the attention from the thoughts to the sensations
here and now.
And to bring this little period of practice to a close,
I'm going to ring a bell, and just
listen to the bell from the beginning of the ring
until it trails off, and you can no longer hear it.
[RINGS BELL]
And you can open your eyes again, and check out the room,
and maybe stretch a tiny bit to feel your body.
And perhaps, you'll notice that just a very few minutes
of beginning to train the mind and train the brain to come out
of the thought stream and into sensory reality
helps us to connect a little bit to what's happening here
and now on a sensory level.
And you may wonder, well, how is that-- how
is breath awareness or doing something like that,
how is that possibly going to help us to deal with all
of life's difficulties and to deal
with these different emotional states?
And that's what I'd like to explain to you now,
and then we'll talk about how to use
these practices to work with some of the difficult states
that arise.
And to understand this, I'd like you to imagine
two very different days.
On the first day, you haven't been sleeping well,
because you've had a bad cold.
And to try to take care of yourself,
you've been eating a lot of junk food and other comfort food,
so you're not feeling terribly healthy.
You haven't really been working out.
You certainly haven't been meditating.
You've been staying up kind of too late watching TV, just
trying to feel a little bit better.
You wake up in the morning after another fitful night,
and you look out the window, and well, if you lived where I do,
it's 33 degrees and raining.
And you feel kind of crummy, and if you live with somebody,
you go into the kitchen, and you have one of those five minute
interactions with another person that
can just ruin your whole day.
You know what these are like.
They just start off bad and quickly escalate.
And then you look at your appointment book,
and you're meeting with many, many too many people,
and a lot of them aren't your favorites.
And it's with this as a backdrop that you get into your car,
and you start driving to work, and at first, it's
barely perceptible, but you think you maybe
hear, thump, thump, thump.
But as the miles go by, it gets louder,
and now it's definitely thump, thump,
and then you feel it in the body, and it's thump, thump,
and you've got a flat tire.
And you've just had the sense of, oh, no, not today.
I can't possibly bear this.
Now imagine a wholly different day.
You haven't had a cold or a virus.
You've been sleeping well.
You've been working out.
Heck, you've been doing mindfulness meditation.
You decide to take good care of yourself,
so you go to bed nice and early.
You wake up naturally without the alarm clock.
You look out the window.
It's 68 degrees, and the sun is shining.
And you go into the kitchen, and you
have one of those five-minute interactions
with another human being that makes
you so glad to live in the world of fellow humans,
to be with other people, to have relationship and connection.
And you look at your appointment book,
and it's a kind of Goldilocks day
for whatever your profession is.
Not so much work that you're going to be burnt out.
Not so little that you going to starve or be fired.
And you look at some of the people you're meeting with,
and you realize, if I weren't working with these folks
professionally, I'd like to have them
as my close personal friends.
And it's with that as a backdrop that you get into your car,
you're driving to work, you're seeing the sky,
you're noticing the trees, and you're at a red light,
and suddenly bam.
You get hit from behind.
And you're startled, of course, but you realize, well, I'm OK.
And you pull your car over.
The other car, the other driver pulls their car over.
And by some miracle, the other driver
doesn't have character problems.
They're like a reasonable balanced person,
and they say, oh, I'm sorry.
And you exchange papers, and you just
have this feeling that, oh, it could've been so much worse.
I'm glad it's just going to be some money and some hassle.
Now on the first day, the intensity of the experience
was a moderate challenge.
It was a flat tire on a rainy day.
But your capacity to bear it was way lower than that,
so you really felt quite overwhelmed.
On the second day, the intensity of the challenge
was considerably greater.
You got in an automobile accident.
But your capacity to bear adversity,
your sense of resilience was much higher than that,
so you took it in stride.
Many of the things we do to try to feel happier,
and in fact, many psychiatric interventions
are designed to decrease the intensity
of painful or uncomfortable experience.
Mindfulness practices, the way they're
going to help us with these things is quite different.
They're going to help us by increasing our capacity
to bear or be with discomfort.
They're going to help us to be more like that samurai guy
with the fly who instead of fighting
the discomfort of the fly, found a way to accept and be
with the discomfort of the fly.
And mindfulness practices can be very, very powerful
in the way they do this.
There's a well-known zen teaching
story about a horrible, sadistic general, who had come to town.
This was in medieval Japan.
And they were burning crops and burning buildings
and killing the able-bodied boys and men,
and they were raping women.
It was horrible.
And this general really want to vanquish the townsfolk,
and he caught wind that they respected their zen master.
So he took his horse, and he rode up the hillside
into the main hall of the zen temple,
and there sitting on the meditation cushion
is this little old man, the zen master.
And the general takes his bloody sword,
and he holds it over the zen master.
He says, don't you realize I can run you through with this sword
without blinking an eye?
And the little man looks up, and he says, yes,
and I, sir, can be run through with a sword
without blinking an eye.
And it's said that at that moment,
the general becomes disoriented and leaves town.
Now it's not always going to work
as a military intervention, but it
speaks to how these practices develop our capacity
to be with discomfort and not to have to escape it.
And the way they help us be with the marginal discomfort
is particularly interesting, because let's say
I'm not a mindfulness guy, and something
happens with a friend of mine.
And he's a good friend, and I've done
all sorts of things for him.
And he does something selfish, treats me dirty.
And I start to think, I can't believe
you did that to me after all the good stuff I've done for you.
And every time I have one of those thoughts,
my body gets all tense, and I get all upset,
and then that brings more of those thoughts.
And we just get stuck in this loop.
Once we've practice mindfulness for awhile,
we start to experience emotions differently.
We start to experience them the way cognitive scientists
actually describe emotions.
A continent of scientists would tell us
an emotion consists of a few simple things.
Take a moment to feel, for example, a little bit
of sadness yourself.
Just imagine something maybe that makes you a little sad.
You notice that that starts off with a body sensation.
Maybe it's a pressure here or here or in the eyes,
so an emotion starts with a body sensation,
and it includes a thought, the sad thought or the memory
or something, and it also includes a visual image.
And that's all there is to it.
Once we've practiced mindfulness for awhile
and spent time dropping out of the thought stream
and staying at the sensory level,
let's say the anger comes up, and all
I experience is the body tensing up,
heart rate increasing, respiration increasing,
blood pressure-- well, you don't feel
blood pressure-- but body temperature increasing.
And perhaps the thought coming and passing like a cloud
in the sky, perhaps the image of decapitating my former friend
dancing through the mind's eye, but it's all
seen as a kind of impersonal process of mental contents
arising and passing.
And when we can experience it that way,
we get much less caught in it, and it's much easier
to let it come and go.
So putting this together, mindfulness practice,
the way it's going to work for us is it's
going to support experiential approach instead
of experiential avoidance, because when
something uncomfortable comes up in mindfulness practice,
instead of quick, how do I change it, how do I fix it,
how do I make myself more comfortable,
we learn to be with it.
This starts at the very sensory level
of simply when an ache or an itch
arises, when we're doing meditation practice,
you simply sit with the ache or the itch,
and maybe turn your attention to the ache or the itch
instead of to the breath.
And that develops this muscle, if you will,
of being able to stay with or be with discomfort.
It helps us to step out of the thought stream.
Instead of believing in our thoughts so much,
we start to see them as mental contents,
as thoughts coming and going.
So we don't get so trapped in them.
In the process, interestingly, we
become much less self-focused.
So all of the nightmares about falling behind and not
being good enough and not getting the best review at work
and all of that-- not that I don't want
you to try hard in your work at Google-- but all
of the self-esteem concerns start
to settle down, because we're not always comparing ourselves
with others.
We're not so centered on ourselves anymore.
By watching things change constantly
in mindfulness practice, we start
to get it that everything is in constant flux.
Everything's constantly changing.
So we're not as freaked out by our kids going off
to college or some health problem or some other change.
And finally, these help us to live in the present moment.
And living in the present moment is enormously useful.
One of my favorite studies in this area
was done by a guy named Matthew Killingsworth,
and he was a grad student at Harvard.
He was in the lab of Dan Gilbert.
Dan Gilbert wrote a book called "Stumbling on Happiness."
He's guy who's done a lot of research
in basically the things we do to try
to be happy that don't work.
So here was Gilbert's study.
He developed a smartphone app, and this app
would randomly page people throughout the day.
And it would ask them three things.
What are you doing?
What are you feeling?
And where was your tension at the moment
that the phone paged you?
And what he found was it didn't really
matter what people were doing in terms of what they were doing
did not predict how they'd feel.
What predicted how they would feel
was where their attention was at the moment the phone rang.
So to use a rather stark example,
if somebody were washing the dishes
and were attending to the experience of washing
the dishes, they reported more enhanced well-being
than somebody who's eating the gourmet meal or making love
but thinking about other things.
So simply training the attention to be in the present moment
starts to increase our level of well-being.
Another very interesting study was
done in the early days of the neurobiological research
on this by Richard Davidson at the Laboratory for Affective
Neurobiology at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.
And he had studied ordinary people
and had found that when people are experiencing states that
are either happy, enthusiastic, energized, engaged,
there's a lot of left prefrontal cortical activity
in the brain, a lot of activity behind this area.
And when people are hypervigilant,
meaning scanning the environment for danger,
doing Lucy's type 1 error, or they're depressed
or they're anxious, there's a lot
of right prefrontal activation.
And this had been studied in ordinary individuals, otherwise
known as college sophomores.
But they actually studied it in grownups also,
and it held true.
Then Richie invited a Tibetan monk who had tens of thousands
of hours of meditation practice under his belt into the lab.
And this guy was simply off the charts
in terms of the degree to which he
had left prefrontal activity but not right prefrontal activity.
He was lateralized in a way that would
make him unbelievably happy.
Rich is a good scientist, so he has to question, well,
maybe people who become monks in Tibet are predisposed this way.
Maybe it had nothing to do with the meditation practice.
Maybe that's just kind of how he grew up or who he was.
So he and Jon Kabat-Zinn got together,
and they did a wonderful little study.
They took a bunch of stressed out biotech workers,
and they randomly assigned them to two groups.
And one group they put through an eight-week mindfulness
training course, and the other group
was just doing business as usual.
And everybody before the study was leaning right.
There was a lot of right prefrontal activation,
because it was a stressed out group of biotech workers.
Not like a Google, where they take good care of you.
After the eight weeks, the group who'd
been through the mindfulness training,
they had shifted much more toward left prefrontal activity
compared to their peers.
They also gave everybody a flu shot at that point,
and it turned out that the people who had been through
the mindfulness training had a more robust response to the flu
vaccine than the people who hadn't.
And then the second group was put though the course,
and they caught up to the first, and they
were leaning left also.
So it was pretty clear that it's actually
the practice that does this is, not simply being
born as somebody who becomes a monk in Tibet.
Now since these practices are going to help us emotionally
by helping us to be with emotional discomfort,
rather than trying to escape it, the studies
on pain and mindfulness become very, very relevant here.
And there have been a number of studies
on experimentally induced pain, and these are studies
in which they take people.
They put them in functional MRI machines,
which are like video machines taking an MRI.
And their feet are sticking out, so they do terrible things
to their feet.
They shock them, or they shoot a laser at them.
Nothing damaging, but things that are painful.
And what they found doing that was that compared to novices,
experienced meditators found the same stimulus
to be much less unpleasant.
They could observe their pain much less reactively.
They found that open monitoring, which
is kind of mindfulness practice in which instead of focusing
on one object like the breath, once you develop
a certain level of concentration,
you open up to whatever predominates
in the field of awareness-- that open monitoring made people
feel that the pain was less unpleasant,
and they also had a lot less anticipatory pain anxiety.
One of the things you see in these studies
is that just waiting for the next shock
causes a great deal of discomfort.
Not so much in the meditators.
And then they went in to look, what's
going on neurobiologically?
And to understand this, I need to just
describe a couple of brain structures to you.
The first structure is the insula,
and that's where it is on the brain.
And that's associated with interoception,
with noticing sensations in the body.
It's about visceral and gut feelings,
and it processes transient sensory perceptions,
things that are coming and going in the body.
And it's very activated during meditation practice,
and in fact, it grows in meditators.
It gets bigger in meditators over time,
which is no surprise, because you
can imagine that tuning into what's going on in the body
would sensitize you to this, and we
know that neurons that fire together wire together.
So any part of the brain that you activate
will get bigger in this way.
The other area we want to discuss here
is the prefrontal cortex, and that
evaluates our emotional responses
and regulates emotion.
That's the part of the brain that's
involved-- to go back to Lucy's experience-- and saying,
yes, it looks like a lion, but lions aren't generally found
in this part of the savanna, so it's probably a beige rock.
It's basically our thinking capacity that
helps to modulate our emotions.
So what do we find neurobiologically?
So meditators practicing open monitoring,
this kind of mindfulness in which you take in whatever
arises, when they're exposed to pain,
they had decreased activity in the lateral prefrontal cortex,
so the part of the brain that's thinking about it
and evaluating it was relatively quiet.
But they had increased activation
in a part in the posterior insula,
so they're actually feeling it more vividly.
So what we've seen neurobiologically
is exactly the same thing the monks have reported
for 2,500 years and anybody who takes up these practices can
see for themselves.
You feel pleasure and pain more vividly,
but you get less upset by it and less freaked out about it,
and the reason you become less upset and less freaked
out about it is because you're no longer resisting it.
You make the transition that the samurai warrior
made from hating the fly to being with the fly.
So in our last little while, I want
to give you an idea of how you can
use these skills to work with everyday kinds of problems.
Anybody here ever feel anxious?
Yeah.
We all do, and it happens quite a bit.
So when cognitive scientists and clinical scientists
study anxiety, they say it has three components to it.
And anxiety disorders have three components to them as well.
The first is physiological arousal.
That's the activation of the sympathetic branch
of the autonomic nervous system and of what's
called the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis, which
is basically a hormonal system that dovetails
with the sympathetic nervous system
to secrete adrenaline and create that wound up,
roused up feeling that we're all too familiar with.
There's a cognitive part of it, and that's
all the negative fantasies about the future.
This is imagining terrible things
happening, which we all do quite readily when
we're feeling anxious.
And then there's a behavioral part of it,
and these are typically our avoidance strategies,
and these are what are most critical in developing
an actual anxiety disorder, because it's,
as I mentioned before, it's not feeling nervous
that's the problem.
It's avoiding things in order to try to not feel nervous
that becomes our problem.
To tell you the truth, even when I'm in the water,
I don't feel that comfortable.
One of the things we notice when we take up mindfulness practice
is just how often we're anxious.
And it takes a lot of forms.
Who among you practices mindfulness
with some regularity?
I'm just curious.
I know Google's got all these wonderful supports for it.
You ever feel restless?
You ever feel like, I kind of want to get up now?
You ever feel tension in your body?
These are all signs of anxiety.
It's very, very pervasive, and when we first
start taking up these mindfulness practices,
we start to notice it quite a bit.
Now take a moment to think about something
that makes you anxious.
Just think of something.
This shouldn't take long.
You got it?
OK.
Is that thing in the past, in the future, or in the present?
What is it?
What?
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
RON SIEGEL: All in the future.
Right, indeed.
We find it's in the future.
Sometimes people will say, well, no,
I'm really anxious about this thing that I did this morning.
But on closer analysis, we realized,
I'm really anxious that I'm going
to be incarcerated this evening for what I did this morning.
The fact that it happened in the problem,
it's anticipating what the result is going to be.
So it turns out that all anxiety is anticipatory,
and even people that are in terrible present situations
worry about the future.
When EMTs extract people from like an automobile crash,
people say, will I be able to walk?
Will I survive?
Will my loved ones be OK?
When we're frightened, we're frightened of the future.
Now this will give you one hint about one
of the ways in which mindfulness practice can
help us work with this, because mindfulness practice is
training the mind to come back into the present, back
into the present, back in the present.
And it's also training us to step out
of the thought stream, because I mean,
yes, occasionally we step out into the street,
and a bus is barreling down on us,
and we're frightened of some physical reality.
And Lucy certainly had lions to worry about.
But for most of us, what makes us anxious is our thoughts,
isn't it?
It's some imagined future going through our minds,
going through the thought stream.
So you can see how by bringing the attention out
of the thought stream, and in addition to that, bringing
the attention to the present moment, that in itself
would help us to work with this.
Interestingly, the Buddha had something
to say about this 2,500 years ago
when he was teaching monks mindfulness practice.
He said, "Why do I dwell always expecting fear and dread?
What if I subdue that fear and dread keeping the same posture
that I'm in when it comes upon me?
While I walked, the fear and dread came upon me.
I neither stood nor sat nor laid down
until I had subdued that fear and dread."
Now these mindfulness practices are classically
practiced in four different postures--
sitting, lying down, walking, and standing.
So what he's saying is, I just stayed with the experience
rather than fleeing, rather than doing something
to try to escape it.
And when he says subdued, what we're really talking about
is riding it out, just trusting that all phenomena are going
to change, including this, and I don't have to do something
compulsively to fix it.
This is a modern example of the same thing.
This is Professor Gallagher and his controversial technique
of simultaneously confronting the fear of heights, snakes,
and the dark.
You don't need a crane to do it.
All you need is a meditation cushion.
All you've got to do is it's necessary to be with fear
and not escape it.
All we need to do to do this in mindfulness practice
is to simply stay with it, stay with the breath,
and start to see the goal not as how
do I get the anxiety to stop, but how do I increase
my capacity to be with it.
And as we do that over time, anxiety disorders
tend to lessen in their intensity.
Now there's a lot of neurobiological evidence
that there are changes that happen
in the brain with mindfulness practice
that are associated with getting better at this.
The amygdala is another structure.
It's a little almond-shaped part of the limbic system,
and this helps us to evaluate threats, to decide,
is it a lion, or is it a beige rock?
It turns out that among meditators, the amygdala
tends to shrink.
We know from neurobiological research
that in rats, if you place them in a stressful environment
in some form of rat hell, their amygdala will grow.
Well, it turns out if you place humans in a meditation course
where they learn mindfulness practice,
their amygdala actually shrinks, because it becomes less active,
and it atrophies a little bit.
And there have been a number of studies showing this.
In one of them, there is an eight-week mindfulness training
for anxious patients, and in the mindfulness group,
the amygdala activation decreased more.
They reported more of a decrease of anxiety
than the other people who were in a general stress reduction
group.
They had more activation of the prefrontal cortex.
This was being able to evaluate whether the thing is actually
dangerous or not, and come to the conclusion
that it isn't, and more connections
between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala.
Now finally, if you're feeling particularly anxious,
it can be difficult to sit and do
meditation and follow the breath,
because we're just too antsy.
We're too restless.
But there are many other different kinds
of meditation practices.
There's walking meditation, eating meditation, nature
meditation.
The sensory object we attend to doesn't
have to be sitting still and being with the breath.
And I'll mention a resource at the end,
but I'll mention it now as well.
They have a website.
It's mindfulness-solution.com, and they have a lot
of different medications.
They're there just to download for free
that you can use to try different modalities to find
one that's relatively easy to work with.
So let's talk about another very common problem, which
is depression.
And now I'm not talking necessarily
about a serious clinical depression, but all of us
get depressed from time to time.
In fact, a lot of times when we get depressed,
it's because our rank in the primate troop has fallen.
There's some way we've had some disappointment, some sense
of failure-- either somebody's rejected us,
or we didn't get the job or the promotion or something
like this-- and we start to kind of give up and feel
despondent about that.
Who here's an engineer?
How'd I guess, right?
Now when you look at a sine wave,
if you alter this so that the bottom half of the sine wave
doesn't dip as low, what's going to happen to the top half?
It's not going to go to as high, right?
The whole thing's going to compress,
because it's symmetrical around the neutral.
This is kind of what happens to us in depression.
As the mind and the brain try to automatically-- because it
really is quite an automatic process-- shut down
on painful experience, we wind up
compressing the entire range of emotion
so that we don't feel joy, we don't
feel engagement is what we were talking about earlier.
So we could think of depression, and here, by the way,
just to make this clear-- I should've said this earlier--
I'm not saying that, for example,
the propensity for anxiety or depression
doesn't have genetic roots, that there aren't
all sorts of causes for this as serious pathology in terms
of childhood abuse, problems growing
up, genetic predispositions, all of what
we know in psychology and psychiatry as true.
I'm just discussing the mechanisms
by which the actual feeling of these things
and the experience of these things
and the behavioral components of this play out
and how mindfulness can help us with this.
So depression involves-- well, there's all this genetic stuff
and all that.
It also involves a turning away from experience,
turning away from pain.
And because mindfulness turns toward the experience at hand,
it winds up challenging the depressive stance.
This is what Bhante Guanarantana--
he's a Buddhist monk-- wrote a nice book called
"Mindfulness" in plain English.
He says, "You become sensitive to the actual experience
of living to how things actually feel.
You do not sit around developing sublime thoughts about living.
You live."
And this comes from simply connecting
to sensory experience over and over,
and not fearing painful emotions brings us back alive.
So when we're using mindfulness practice
to work with depression, we're actually
interested in what painful thing the depression
may be masking, covering up, or blocking out.
And we discovered this by seeing what's going on in the body
right now.
If I'm feeling depressed, what exactly
is happening in the body?
What emotions may be manifesting there?
We also look at our relationship to the pain.
Am I fighting it?
Am I resisting it?
Am I being like the samurai guy with the sword?
Or am I to able to simply hang out with it?
And then to see if we can be compassionate toward ourselves,
if we can stay with it.
And as one of you mentioned, there's
a lot of hopelessness involved in depression,
and there's an interesting cognitive model
for that developed by the people who developed something called
mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, in which they
said that when we just get sad, we just feel sad.
But when we get depressed, there's
a whole matrix of thoughts that go around that.
It's hopeless.
I'm a failure.
I'm worthless.
I'm unloved.
All these kinds of thoughts happen.
And if we have a propensity toward depression,
then every time that we get discouraged in some way,
this whole collection of thoughts
comes and visits us again and causes us grief again.
So if we can begin to see these thoughts as coming and going
like an itch or an ache, or like the clouds passing
through the sky, we're going to have a much easier time
with the depression.
So what we do with mindfulness practice
is see the thoughts aren't facts.
I'm not my thoughts.
Refuting them often falls flat.
If you try to talk your way out of the depressive stance--
you've done that, I'm sure.
It doesn't tend to work.
But if you change your relationship to thinking,
and you start to see all thought as changing and unreliable,
it becomes much easier.
There have been studies of this using
mindfulness-based cognitive therapy,
and just to say briefly, what they found was after a year,
this was treating people who had had serious depressive
episodes, and they put them through this mindfulness
program when they weren't depressed
to see who would relapse.
And they found that after a year, 66% or 2/3
of the people that had mindfulness-based cognitive
therapy, MBCT, had managed not to relapse, while only 1/3
with TAU, which is Treatment as Usual,
had managed not to relapse.
So it cut the relapse rate in half.
It cut in half the rate by which people fell back
into serious depression.
And this-- by the way, this was back in 2000--
was the first big study that really got mindfulness
on the map in terms of funding to do research in this,
because that was a very, very powerful outcome.
One other thing you can do is to practice
what we might call affective or emotional meteorology, which
is simply to notice that emotions and thoughts change.
And when feeling depressed, to simply ask the question, when
in the past did you not feel depressed,
and how were your thought patterns different?
And usually what we notice is that, oh,
yeah, well, back then, I actually had some hope.
I thought I was OK.
I felt good about myself.
But when we're depressed, we think,
I was just fooling myself.
That was an illusion.
Now I know that I'm doomed.
The opposite's true too.
When we pull out of the depression,
we remember the depressed thoughts,
and we think, oh, yeah, well, that was just the depression
talking.
What we start to notice through mindfulness practice
is these thought patterns change like the weather,
and they're all really, really, very, very unreliable.
So to summarize the kind of attitude
that we might take toward our experience of mindful
attitude toward experience in dealing
with depression, anxiety, and other things,
I want to quote Rumi.
He's a 13th century Islamic mystical poet
and there's a very well-known poem
he wrote called "The Guest House," and here's how it goes.
"This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival, a joy, a depression, a meanness.
Some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all, even if they're
proud of sorrows who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture, still treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice--
meet them at the door laughing, and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes, because each has been
sent as a guide from beyond."
So I think that's about it for our time.
In terms of resources, this was the website I mentioned,
mindfulness-solution.com, and there's a Download Meditation
section to that.
And you can download-- there's probably about 20
of them-- different meditations that you can use.
Also within the Google system, there's
a whole list of references from the various studies
that I alluded to today.
You can check that out.
If you're interested in learning more about this,
there's a book that goes with the website called
"The Mindfulness Solution," which
I wrote for general audiences, which talks about how
to develop a mindfulness practice in a step-by-step way
in the course of a busy life, and then how to use it.
There are separate chapters on using
it to work with anxiety, with depression,
with interpersonal challenges, with chronic pain,
difficulties with aging, with really a wide variety
of everyday practice, everyday problems,
and you're welcome to check that out as well.
So thank you for coming.
Thank you for your attention.
[APPLAUSE]
AUDIENCE: I'll ask, how long do you
think the average Googler would need to start practicing
mindfulness before they start to see a difference in themselves?
RON SIEGEL: Well, it's interesting.
When Jon Kabat-Zinn set up a program
called mindfulness-based stress reduction, which
was one of the first programs to package mindfulness practice
and disseminate it to secular audiences
and to use it in the medical world,
he, in that eight-week training program,
asked people to do about 45 minutes a day.
So fairly intense commitment, and if you
do that over the course of eight weeks,
you get these profound changes in brain function, brain
structure, you really feel it.
Now some people aren't going to be willing to do that.
I find that, personally, I notice
I'm doing better if I can devote 20 minutes a day
compared to not doing the practice.
And there have been a number of studies showing
that relatively small doses over relatively short periods
of time still have effects, but this stuff
does tend to be dose-related, and the more time, the more
profound the effects tend to be.
AUDIENCE: So I've done a little bit of this sort of meditation
and kind of trying to be with the thoughts but not interact,
and what I find is that either I'm completely carried away
with it, or I go back to this reflex
where I just disengage and disconnect.
And I'm interested in if you have advice
on how to sort of be with it, but not get carried in
and not run.
RON SIEGEL: Yeah.
Well, you know, in the various systems
of mindfulness meditation, there are
different objects of meditation that are suggested.
Most of the systems start with just sensory experiences
like the breath, like sounds, like the sights of nature,
like the sensation of the body sitting in the chair,
but one can also then expand out to mindfulness
of feeling and mindfulness of thought, even.
But it's much harder to do those until you
have a pretty strong base in concentration,
exactly what you're describing, because unless the mind
is accustomed to staying with a given mental object, as soon
as it moves into the realm of thought, it tends to take off.
So we feel like we've got two options.
One is to sort of ignore thought, or just
get into thinking.
So for me, personally, it's really only
when I've been meditating more, and I've
got a fair bit of momentum of concentration
that I pay much attention to the mindfulness of thought.
Most the time I stay at the sensory level,
but the sensory level includes emotions
in the sense that at the sensory level
comes fear or anger or joy or sexual interest or sadness,
because all of these things begin as bodily events.
So I can stay at the sensory level
and still explore a lot of experience,
but I usually choose when I'm doing the practice
to not try mindfulness of thought,
unless I'm in a retreat setting where I'm really developing
a lot of concentration, because I'm
sort of meditating for hours at a time in one form or another.
And then there's sufficient awareness and attention
to be able to see a thought without getting caught in it.
But exactly what you're describing
is what's described historically over thousands
of years of people experimenting with this.
OK.
So thank you so much for coming, everybody.
[APPLAUSE]